Head of Research [NYC or SF]

Amigo•New York City, NY

2d•Hybrid

About The Position

Clinical AI is only worth deploying if someone can demonstrate that it works. Our agents have supported millions of patient encounters, which means we’re held to a clinical standard and trust is earned from clinicians, regulators, and academic reviewers. As Head of Research, you’ll own that case. You’ll build Amigo’s research function from the ground up: hiring researchers, setting the agenda alongside our CTO, and owning how our systems are evaluated. That includes benchmarks, patient simulation, diagnostic reasoning evaluation, and the studies that show a clinical agent behaves appropriately in the settings where it is actually deployed. You’ll also own how this work reaches the outside world through publications, academic collaborations, and the regulatory and policy conversations that follow. Research sits unusually close to the product here. We deploy into live health systems, so findings are expected to change what we ship and the standards you set determine what’s allowed in front of patients. You’ll work directly with the clinicians on our team so the research reflects how medicine is practiced, not just how it appears in a dataset. This role blends scientific leadership with organizational judgment. You’ll be building a function, not joining one, while representing Amigo’s technical credibility externally. The ideal candidate brings deep research expertise, the operational discipline to run programs to completion (and stop them when appropriate), and the communication skills to make rigorous work legible to clinical and regulatory audiences.

Requirements

A track record of running research programs—not just contributing to them. You have owned scope, people, timelines, and the decision to stop
A background in AI for health at a research lab or an equivalent setting. Work on systems like Google DeepMind's AMIE, or leading health research efforts at a major lab, is the shape we have in mind
A public record of rigorous work: publications, evaluation studies, benchmarks, or systems other researchers use
Fluency in clinical evaluation, including study design, what counts as evidence in medicine, and why a benchmark result is not a clinical claim
Experience hiring and developing researchers, and building the practices a research function runs on
Comfort in policy and regulatory conversations, and the judgment to communicate limitations clearly
Excellent written and verbal communication, with the ability to make technical work credible to clinical and non-technical audiences
A strong sense of ownership, and the willingness to build the function rather than inherit it

Nice To Haves

Clinical training. Practising or former clinicians who moved into research are very welcome
Experience with regulatory submissions, clinical trials, or evidence generation for a regulated product
Experience evaluating agentic or multi-step LLM systems rather than single-turn models
Existing relationships across academic medicine or health policy

Responsibilities

Build and lead the research team by hiring researchers and setting the research agenda with our CTO
Own how we evaluate clinical agents, including benchmarks, patient simulation, diagnostic reasoning evaluation, and the standards a system must meet before it reaches a patient
Design and run studies that hold up to clinical scrutiny, and decide which programs continue and which should stop
Publish, and turn our existing academic partnerships into substantive collaborations rather than logos
Represent Amigo’s research externally to clinicians, regulators, academic partners, and the wider research community
Own how we describe what our systems can and cannot do, including limitations, with the judgment that regulated communication requires
Work directly with the clinicians on our team so evaluation reflects real clinical practice
Translate findings into product decisions, working with engineering and the deployment teams so research changes what we ship